Game Tape #3: Timothée Chalamet has a Supreme marketing meeting

Exaggerate the absurdity of the spicy present

Game Tape is my weekly series pulling lessons from a new media property. Notice an interesting moment you want me to talk about? Hit reply and share it with me.

I always joke that I discovered movies, like, a year ago.¹

I watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off for the first time last week (banger), and nothing makes me happier than watching a classic and then messaging my cinephile² friends that “I think this whole movie thing has some legs to it.” This is probably more a testament to my cooked attention span than anything else, but it does imply that I haven’t really been inspired by many movie rollouts. Which is why I was surprised to be laughing out loud at Marty Supreme’s fantastic marketing meeting stunt.

It’s worth watching the entire video above if you haven’t already, but the gist is:

1. A marketing team gets on a Zoom call, waiting to pitch some campaign ideas to Timothée Chalamet, who plays Marty.
   

2. Chalamet mogs them and takes over the call to pitch them his own ideas.
   

3. He proceeds to pitch totally absurd ideas, from owning the colour orange the same way Barbie owns the colour pink, to recolouring the Statue Of Liberty so people will think of Marty Supreme “when they arrive to New York, whether it’s for tourism or out of dire need.”

This stunt isn’t directly applicable to a brand or startup trying to build a branded entertainment property, since it relies on a lot of Timothée’s existing celebrity for it to work, but there are still a few broader content learnings to underline:

I. Exaggerate the absurdity of the spicy present

MSCHF, the GOATs of modern stunt marketing, tell us to “look for ways to exacerbate the Spicy Present, to extrapolate it into absurdity. It is not fiction or future; it is the accelerated and intensified present.” Where other movie rollouts are trying to go viral on the coattails of an existing trend, this one opts for a more meta commentary: what if we exaggerated how absurd it is to brainstorm a viral moment?

The “Spicy Present” is a good framework for brainstorming a stunt of any kind, but in this specific context, it’s also a good opportunity for the audience to feel like they’re in on the joke. Even as someone who doesn’t really watch movies, I know that Chalamet is the people’s champ with a reputation as an earnest king. So manufacturing a moment that leans into that earnestness feels like a wink towards how the audience already perceives him.

II. Design self-contained clippable moments

Clips, for better or worse, are taking over the internet. Longform content has to increase its surface area for shareability through self-contained moments — slices that can be consumed without any context on the broader work. This stunt feels as though it was scripted like a Twitch livestream, with several baked-in shareable segments, including:

SHWEP

There is no greater power than introducing a new word or phrase to someone’s lexicon. Every time Chalamet compliments one of director Josh Safdie’s previous movies, he punctuates it with a SHWEP. I’m pretty online with a prolific range of slang and even I’ve never heard that phrase before, which makes it a perfectly absurd hook for folks to clip or echo in the comments section.

Culmination, Integration, Fruitionizing

Chalamet repeats a bunch of inane mantras over the course of the call, including “MARTY SUPREME CHRISTMAS DAY,” “Greatness, greatness, greatness,” (which the entire group chants along with) and maybe the most ridiculous, “Culmination, Integration, Fruitionilizing.” It’s the sort of absurdity that is pure internet catnip, and you can see him already doubling down on it on his own socials.

Easter eggs

The meeting gets more and more absurd as it progresses, and at one point Chalamet shares his laptop screen and his background picture is of himself. Of course people are going to inspect his screen for easter eggs — this is obviously clip bait!

III. Visual form should be in service of your concept

Most content creators are still treating a “hook” as though it can only be a pithy one-liner to kick off your video. But that’s obviously not true — a hook can be any mechanism to get someone’s attention in the first ~3 seconds.³ My favourite visual hooks also manage to tee up or magnify the concept of the video itself, such as the Fashion Neurosis podcast and its fantastic bird’s-eye-view of a therapist’s couch. The visual form primes you for the concept itself: you know you’re about to witness a therapy session.

The Zoom call might seem like the obvious format to land this concept — the laptop class can empathize with the feeling of tiles slowly popping up on your screen, warming up before an external party joins, the ridiculousness of five minutes of introductions before the call begins, etc. But you can also easily imagine the team having opted for something else, such as the suddenly hyper popular The Office mockumentary format. The magic, then, is in choosing an immediately recognizable format that both stands out on the infinite scroll of socials and magnifies your concept.

I don’t think you can remix this campaign without meaningful celebrity power or some incredibly high-context brand lore. But you can dissect it for its fundamental strategy: exaggerate the absurdity of the present moment, design self-contained clippable moments, and choose a visual form that magnifies your concept.

God, I would love it if the tech industry could be this funny.

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Things I’m consuming this week:

• Jackson Dahl’s fantastic interview with the TBPN boys. It’s fascinating to see how calculated most of their worldbuilding has been, such as their trademark Gong as a mechanism to spike the energy levels during high-variance guest segments. TBPN in many ways has indirectly inspired this newsletter — there is so much care that goes into the details of building a media business, and it’s exciting to study game tape from the pros.

• A new animated series, heavily inspired by Indian epics, is working with some animators from the League Of Legend show, Arcane. I often joke that Zohran has officially kicked off the brown boy decade, but I’m unironically excited that there’ll be some high-production storytelling to offset the brutal anti-brown sentiment of the last few years.

• Rachel Karten’s great essay on the future of the feed. Rage bait is not the only way forward!

1. I went on a date many many years ago (pre-movie-discovery), and when asked what my favourite movie was, I said Interstellar. She ragged on me quite a bit for such a basic choice, which I felt sheepish about, until last year’s Interstellar theatre re-release had all the cinephiles going crazy. She recently apologized to me for her misjudgement. The lion does not concern himself with having a basic taste in entertainment.

2. Crazy thing to call yourself in the middle of the Epstein news cycle, btw.

3. The meta is always changing here: in 2023 the ecommerce industry was in love with “ugly ads”, recently brands are doing the ridiculous “Notes app apology” posts, posts that look like ChatGPT conversations, etc.